Creating vs. consuming

The thesis of this piece is simple: have a creator mindset, not a consumer one.

Technology, broadly, can be used to create or consume. I remember when I got my first Macbook at the beginning of high-school. It came preloaded with iPhoto, Garage Band, Photo Booth (the prelude to Snapchat with its snazzy filters, in retrospect), among other creator apps. These Creator Apps are the ones I remember most. They were empowering. With one, I felt like a superhero, able to make music, edit photos, stitch together pictures into a slideshow. iMovie and Final Cut Pro were most exciting for me. They were tools that enabled iteration and experimentation.

Of course, Macbooks also came with Consumer Apps. Back then it was iTunes and another one to watch movies and TV shows. I think you had to download games, or play them on the internet.

I bet if you ran an experiment to determine the correlation between a child’s success later in life and whether they spent more time on Creator or Consumer apps, you would see a correlation that the more time they spent on the Creator apps, the more successful they became.

You might come back at me and say, no, these people won’t be more successful, just more creative. And that a perfectly good lawyer or doctor could spend all their “technology time” consuming and not creating.

I think that’s true. That’s why it’s not a good experiment. The creator/consumer mindset goes beyond technology. It is an orientation, one that even lawyers or doctors can have.

I believe that, at any given point, a person’s orientation is either to create or consume.

One way to describe it is that a creator is the life of the party. Not the frat party, but the party of life. He or she does not rely on others for entertainment. Such people are the players on the field, orchestrating history as it unfolds, carving their destiny decision-by-decision. For the psych majors, creators have an internal locus of control.

In contrast, consumers generally believe that the conditions, not their decisions, determine reality. An external locus of control. Other people do interesting stuff and I hear about it after. I watch the show. Listen to the song. React to the news.

To be sure, both are important. In order to create, a person needs to consume a lot. “Behind any prolific writer I think you will find a voracious reader,” I wrote. But that’s a conditional statement. It says that consuming is valuable only insofar as it leads to creation. Is that true, or is there inherent value in consuming?

Hmmm. Not sure. Did God ever consume anything? He surely created a whole lot.